Take advantage of Excel Power Pivot and enable write-back to your data warehouse

Category Archives: Budgeting

Power Pivot now supports write-back. If the company has invested extensively in Power Pivot you are sitting on a gold-mine.. Most budgeting and forecasting solutions costs a gold mine to implement. You can take advantage of your investment by just checking the box in Power Planner, and start the forecasting process right now.

Install Power Planner

Go to the Power Planner website and install the trial solution.

Enable Write Back in Excel Power Pivot

If your Power Pivot is built from a SQL Database, you can just login, share, and start forecasting with the speed and usability of Power Pivot.

Share and Enable Powerful Budgeting and Forecasting features

Power Pivot has

Budgeting, Forecast and Planning Features

Product and Sales Planning

Power Planner (PP) has a robust feature set for the Business Units like the sales or marketing team to model sales forecast by SKU, Client, Quantity, Discount or Price by Unit. Users can drive numbers with allocations from prior year sales, and change top-level targets for easy automated allocations.

Cost of Goods Sold

COGS calculations can be derived from sales numbers based on model calculations or Excel Formulas. Standard Costs and Theoretical Cost of Materials can be modeled with Excel formulas, and updated in the model for easy reporting and Gross Profit analysis.

Selling, General & Administrative

Business Trips, IT Spending, Office and Legal Expenses are easily added with comments by contributors. The Line Item Detail and commenting feature makes it easy to get a picture of discretionary spending.

Employee and Onboarding

By uploading the company roster, salaries and benefits to Excel, Power Planner proposes a new Employee Expense Budget or Forecast Scenario. By applying simple formulas like ‘inc10%’, an employee’s salary will increase by 10%. Employment and withholding taxes are automatically transferred to the SGA budget.

Balance Sheet

Balance Sheet projections are derived from the P&L with simple rules describing the relationship of Accounts Receivable/Payable, Cash, Retained Earnings and Short-Term Debt. Other items like Assets and Depreciation can be modified in the BS directly in order to get a complete overview over corporate performance and funding requirements.

Cash Flow Impact Analysis

In order to analyze impact from Operations, Investing and Financing Activities, the integrated Cash Flow section of Power Planner provides powerful insight into the effects or projected operations and the financing activities required to keep a ‘going concern’.

Spreading, Allocation and Overhead

Taxes, depreciations and other variable driver based spending is built into the model with Excel based calculations, or more advanced DAX modeling language.

Forecasts

With virtually unlimited budget and forecast versions, PP empowers the model to handle an automated 12 month rolling forecast, with the ability to compare versions back in time to analyze what has changed.

Goal Seeking

Power Planner’s unique Goal Seeking features integrates all key modules; Product, Employee, SGA, P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow in order to set targets, and analyze the impact on operations. I.e. our clients analyze impact in Net Profit by seeking to adjust quantities sold.

Power Pivot Features

Power Pivot Write Back

Power Update enables any user to edit any number in Pivot Tables, add comments, spread and allocate figures in Excel, and update the data warehouse based on role based access rights. Power Pivot tables in Excel is still the de facto #1 choice for Business Analysts and Decision Makers to analyze, slice, and dice corporate data. Power Planner enables role based collaboration in the corporate tool of choice by analyzing and testing out different scenarios.The workbook can be published on a Shared Drive, Share Point on premise, SSAS Tabular model, or Office 365.

Security

Power Planner adds a separate layer of user-, or role based security in Power Pivot for Excel, SharePoint or Tabular models. PP also manage what attributes, products, clients, or cost centers users have access to, even in Power Pivot for Excel

Adding and Editing New Members

The Adding and Editing New Member features, allows users with proper access right to add or edit members from the DW in Excel. In forecasting and budgeting processes, sales people may add new products that will be used in the new forecast for planning of product launches and new product groups.

Modifying SQL Tables – Master Data Management

Additionally you may add new columns and control data types of columns in the DW. For smaller companies this feature can substitute the need for a Master Data Management feature by editing and updating SQL data in Excel.

Copy and Shifting Data

Power Planner has a complete feature set for copying member from one scenario to the other or copy actual performance data from clients and turn them into new forecasts in the model. The “Shift Data Feature” enables data to be moved from a calendar year, month, or date into a new time period.

Commenting

Traditional Power Pivot tables does not support commenting, but with Power Planner comments are saved in the database. This means they will always show up when users are looking at the same intersection or tuple of the DW.

Web Service

PP WebSevice makes any Excel PowerPivot Model into a server, so any user may access the Power Pivot in multi-user mode.

Model Versioning

When using Power Pivot for Excel, users may be required to make changes to the model itself. If the model is distributed among many users, the same changes have to be manually enabled in each and every model. With Power Planner, a model is saved to the SQL server, and users get prompted to update their Excel Workbook when they open an older model but the last published version. This ensures consistencies, and is a time saver for shared models.

Office 365 and Power BI

Power Planner uses Excel Services to render models on the web. Users have access to all the same features on the web as they have in the thick client of Excel.

SharePoint on-Premise

Power Planner enables complex workbooks in SharePoint to be shared on the intranet on premise.

SharePoint Online – Office 365

For companies that are deploying or migrating to O365, Power Planner is a certified app that co-exists in the Office 365 models. Power Planner may be deployed in a Windows Azure hosted environment with Power BI with the thick client of Excel or Excel Services(Web)

Power Pivot and Data Modeling

Different from most Business Performance Management solutions, Power Planner takes advantage of the investment already made in the Corporate Data Warehouse. There is no need to adopt to a new and rigid template data model. PP is already setup to take advantage of your tabular model in Excel, SharePoint or SSAS. The budgeting solutions comes to you, you don’t have to build it the way the vendor tells you!